Businesses today rely heavily on conferencing services to enable people to meet without having to be in the same physical location. Audio conferencing, video conferencing, and Web conferencing are all well-known services available to businesses that do business on a regional, national, or global scale. Typically, a business makes a reservation for a conference through a conferencing services provider. The conferencing services provider establishes a “virtual location,” e.g., a dial-in phone number or Website address, for the conference participants. After the conference is over, the conferencing services provider bills the business for the cost of the conference.
Conventional conferencing services providers suffer from several drawbacks. For example, if a customer bills reimbursable expenses to its own clients, someone in the customer's financial services department must manually process each conference bill to enable the customer to pass conferencing charges on to its clients. For a customer with hundreds of clients, this not only takes a great deal of time but human mistakes may result in billing one client for another's conferences, resulting in client-relation problems. Even when conferencing services bills are made available to customers electronically, the data provided is typically limited to call-level information such as the number of participants, the overall cost of the conference, etc.
Furthermore, management of conference services involves a number of different people, each requiring different levels of access and information. A telecommunications person may be involved in administering accounts, while the company's financial staff may be involved in processing bills, and an administrator may be designated to oversee the company's dealings with the conferencing services provider. Depending on individual needs and responsibilities, each person may need access to different information. This may be very difficult to manage for a conventional conferencing services provider.
Still further, conference participants frequently participate in several conferences in the same day or week. Often, participants may discuss several different billable matters during a single conference. For participants who bill for their time, such as attorneys or consultants, it becomes difficult to keep track of time and topics of multiple conferences. While a conventional conferencing services provider may provide the conference facility and general information about a conference, there are no tools readily available to assist participants and their companies in accurately and fully capturing time spent on conferences.
Systems and methods consistent with embodiments of the present invention address these and other drawbacks of conventional conferencing services provider systems.